Zoom/magnifier

[YaLTeR]

Accessibility feature that zooms in the screen around the cursor.

This works https://github.com/negrel/wooz but is a bit fiddly to run.

Need to see how the magnifier works in other compositors, especially GNOME and KDE. I pretty much never used it so I'm not sure what the expected UX is.

Tentatively, I'm thinking discrete actions could look something like:

binds {
    Mod+Alt+WheelScrollUp   { set-zoom-level "+10%"; }
    Mod+Alt+WheelScrollDown { set-zoom-level "-10%"; }
}

But it should ideally be a gesture to use high-precision touchpad swipe input and high-precision scroll inputs (if the mouse supports it).

For other monitors (the ones where the cursor currently isn't) I guess we don't do any zooming?

When opening the screenshot UI, need to see what would feel good to use.

Implementation-wise, idk how cursed it would be to simply scale all render elements on an output? If it works, then it's probably fine for the first implementation. Though, it will do bilinear scaling rather than nearest.

If this doesn't work, or for nearest scaling, we would probably want to render into a texture, then render that texture, upscaled around the cursor with the nearest filter. Not sure how this will work with damage tracking though.

[albassort]

This would be a very positive improvement and would very differentiate this project. To my knowledge, neither Sway or Hyprland have any functioning zoom, and neither does other x11 compositors. This is quite important to accessibility, and for me personally, as a low-vision person, is mandatory.

[YaLTeR]

Here a heavy screen magnifier user says KDE has a very good implementation: https://mastodon.social/@acidiclight/114065863939963061

They also gave detailed feedback to COSMIC: pop-os/cosmic-comp#1237

Something to check out for reference.

[SergioRibera]

For what it's worth, at the time I was making this application to have a magnifier in wayland inspired by MacOs, the repository has no readme because it was a very conceptual idea and I was not achieving my goal with winit (I had to make a fork).

2025-03-06_02-02-00.mp4

[systemd11]

@SergioRibera does this magnifier work in full screen too?

[SergioRibera]

@systemd11 I should but I really don't think my application is ready for production

[zgibberish]

i've always wanted screen zoom functionality when i used other wms, accessibility is always hit or miss on linux, im so glad to see there's actual interest in this

i noticed a lot of screen magnifier tools just display a small zoomed in area, is it tricky to implement fullscreen zoom that doesn't freeze the whole display, and allows clicking stuff on screen (something like windows's screen magnifier)?

[Vescrity]

i noticed a lot of screen magnifier tools just display a small zoomed in area, is it tricky to implement fullscreen zoom that doesn't freeze the whole display, and allows clicking stuff on screen (something like windows's screen magnifier)?

Wayfire can do that

[miku4k]

But it should ideally be a gesture to use high-precision touchpad swipe input and high-precision scroll inputs (if the mouse supports it).

i prefer full screen zoom being a keybind i think (thats also the standard), tho i make great use of firefoxs pinch zoom gesture too

When opening the screenshot UI, need to see what would feel good to use.

i think keeping it above the screenshot ui makes the most sense.

To my knowledge, neither Sway or Hyprland have any functioning zoom, and neither does other x11 compositors.

@albassort hyprland somehow does. its controlled by a config value tho, meaning you have to write a script yourself to make it usable

[bertbesser]

I'm coming from xfce, which has very basic functionality built-in, which works very fine though. You can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNcgIf_zo2w&t=190s

It's

• activated with +mousewheel,
• won't "freeze" the screen (you can e.g. see a video continue playing when zoomed in), and
• you can continue to interact (click, type).

Just for reference, b/c it would be really great to have sth. similar in niri - whether built-in or added by some tool. I'm not sure, though, what it would require to be implemented.

Thanks for Niri! ♥️

[Atan-D-RP4]

On hyprland, I can do something like this:
sh -c "hyprctl -q keyword cursor:zoom_factor $(hyprctl getoption cursor:zoom_factor | awk '/^float.*/ {print $2 * 0.9}')".

I've used lua to communicate with Hyprland's IPC and to parse output from libinput debug-events (I don't know how else to get touchpad gesture events but I don't like it because this needs a udev rule) and then make hyprctl-like IPC calls based on the parsed touchpad events.

It looks like this:
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ab34d084-e8d3-4633-a2f4-943d96278ad5

Lua code:
https://github.com/Atan-D-RP4/HyDE/blob/master/Configs/.local/lib/hyde/zoom.lua

I think exposing a zoom option on the cursor, similar to Hyprland, would be enough.

[Crdr0122]

When using the overview gesture and instead dragging down, I can see the window being somewhat magnified. How different would this be from an actual zoom implementation?

[Atan-D-RP4]

I wrote up a simple implementation for cursor focused zoom on Niri in #3246.

Please check it out!

Demo:

260115_15h18m17s_recording.mp4